Quotes About Virtue

You don't get to choose the value of what you do in others' eyes, so you have to take stock in knowing that doing the right thing is enough, no matter who notices.

Remember, life is what we make of it. Stay away from hog (the swine), the stinking tobacco weed, the hot fiery alcohol, wine, beer, drugs, foolishness, ignorance, madness, drunkenness, gambling, murdering, robbery, deceitfulness, lying, mockery and seeking to take advantage of your brother and your sister, and believe in the presence of God

The charitable acts that count the most, Greer believes, are those done without anyone knowing.

Courage is rightly esteemed the first of human qualities … because it is the quality which guarantees all others," Churchill said.

In fine, that it is not enough to be good, without behaving in such a manner as shall make others acknowledge us to be so.

She had Discernment to forsee, and avoid all those Ills which might attend the Loss of her Reputation, but was wholly blind to those of the Ruin of her Virtue; and having managed her Affairs so as to secure the one, grew perfectly easy with the Remembrance, she had forfeited the other.

It is easier to be generous than to be just.

feminist theology today, a primary aim of their theology was practical. They wanted to move Church and society to accountability, humanness, justice, virtue, and peace.

She lived, we'll say, A harmless life, she called a virtuous life, A quiet life, which was not life at all (But that she had not lived enough to know)

A harmless life, she called a virtuous life, A quiet life, which was not life at all . . .

If Fourierism could be realised (which it surely cannot) out of a dream, the destinies of our race would shrivel up under the unnatural heat, and human nature would, in my mind, be desecrated and dishonored — because I do not believe in purification without suffering, in progress without struggle, in virtue without temptation. Least of all do I consider happiness the end of man's life. We look to higher things, have nobler ambitions.

You couldn't teach kindness, she thought. It was something you were born with. People either had it or they didn't.

Good people were also capable of doing very bad things.

He used to tell me when Mr. Boswell asked Dr. Johnson which was the greatest of the virtues, he answered unhesitatingly, 'Courage,' and when Mr. Boswell asked him why, he said, 'Because, sir, without courage, one will have little opportunity to practice the other virtues.

One was born a certain sort of person, and though by ceasless struggle one might become as nice as that sort of person ever is, one could never become as nice as a nicer sort of person.

It's a poor sort of virtue that has no roots in love. It's why you do or don't do a thing that matters most to my mind. If love of God comes first with you then you deny yourself to keep His commandments, you give away your whole life to Him and glory in what the world calls loss.

Near this spot are deposited the remains of one who possessed Beauty without Vanity, Strength without Insolence, Courage without Ferocity, and all the Virtues of Man without his Vices. This praise, which would be unmeaning Flattery, if inscribed over human ashes, is but a just Tribute to the Memory of BOATSWAIN, a Dog.

This point is fundamental for Plato and his legacy to the West. Knowledge is always the prerequisite of virtue, just as ignorance always leads us into evil. For Plato and all Platonists who come after him, grasping a standard of perfection is what we need in order to be virtuous and ultimately happy.

The job of ethics, Aristotle asserts, "is not that we may know what virtue is, but that we may become virtuous," especially in our daily dealings with others.

for Aristotle ethics is not a science. We aren't looking for moral perfection. "In fact, such a life is not possible for man," Aristotle states. "If it were, he would be a God."23 Instead, we look for advantage and improvement. From that point of view, Aristotle assures us, learning to be virtuous is not that hard. It's all a matter of practice and learning the habits that go with it.

Seneca's solution to life's inevitable cruelties was to withdraw. It was an increasingly attractive reaction in the later imperial age. The wise man must shun unnecessary human contact and connections, Seneca said. He must live within, and for, himself. He must cultivate the virtue of apatheia, literally an indifference to the fate of others—apathy even, in the last moment, to his own fate (faced by unjust accusations by the emperor Nero, Seneca and his wife chose suicide).

Beginning with their founder, Zeno, the Stoics taught that the key to the happy life is adhering to a strict sense of virtue and a rigid duty toward others rather than indulging in pleasure, and a renunciation of, or at least an indifference to, all worldly goods.

What was the secret of the Jews' strength and virtue? Origen offered the answer. First of all, their Scripture with its power to transform multitudes, "making the coward the hero, and the wicked good." Then there was their faith: a faith more powerful than human reason alone, because it was based on still higher wisdom, the wisdom of God.

The fact is that a man who wants to act virtuously in every way necessarily comes to grief among so many who are not virtuous. —Niccolò Machiavelli, 1513